Will This Natural Gas Crisis Inspire Change?

Hard to believe it’s been ten years since a spell of unusually cold weather took us to the brink of losing pressure in the country’s natural gas pipelines, but here we are again. About 40,000 New Mexican Gas Company customers don’t have gas service right now because the pipelines that deliver their gas can’t keep up with the demand. New Mexico, with at least ten cities affected, has been hardest hit by outages, but natural gas service is also out in parts of El Paso, Tucson and San Diego, and the problem looks as if it may still be spreading.

Ironically, as customers without gas service turn to electric heaters, the demand for natural gas could actually rise further as the spike in electrical demand triggers utility gas-turbine generators to start up. When that happens, gas is essentially still being used for heating, but via a far less efficient process – one that first turns the gas into electricity and sends it down the wires before customers turn the gas-generated electricity back into heat.

There are still many questions as events continues unfolding, but the question that should be on everyone’s mind is this one:  Will this crisis awaken us to the vulnerability of relying on big, central networks like the gas pipelines and the electric grid, and prompt us to develop local self-reliance in energy?

Sadly, I have reason to doubt that it will.

First of all, the natural gas crisis we faced ten years ago was worse than our current crisis, and it certainly didn’t prompt any movement toward self-reliance. At that time the production of natural gas in our most prolific basins was declining fast – so fast that we were unable to drill new wells fast enough to make up for the declines in existing wells. Essentially we were running on a treadmill, unable to run fast enough to keep the nation’s storage tanks filled. When energy traders realized the tanks were just days away from empty, they began bidding up the price of gas, sending heating bills soaring to record levels. But then a miracle occurred:  Spring arrived. Natural gas demand collapsed, and everyone forgot all about the crisis. (Well, almost everyone – the nonprofit Local Energy was born out of the seven months of research that I and my colleagues undertook following the event.)

This time around, thanks to an advance in gas production called hydraulic fracturing and an abysmal economy, it doesn’t appear that we ran short of gas. Nope, this time it wasn’t anything nearly as serious as depletion of a major energy resource. The problem was simply that our pipelines weren’t up to matching the power of a storm measuring two-thousand miles across and dropping temperatures as much as 30 degrees below normal over much of the country. The sudden demand for heating fuel could have been met with the gas in storage had there been sufficient pipeline capacity to deliver the gas quickly enough. Delivery was further frustrated, according to reports, by problems at gas-compressor stations that may have been a result of rolling electrical blackouts – another consequence of the high heating demand created by the storm.

My guess is that the discussion of energy self-reliance is still nowhere near the table. More likely, our new governor and her experts will advocate that we avoid further crises by accelerating investments in our gas pipelines and electric transmission lines. But every dollar we spend on these highly centralized networks increases our dependence on them, and diverts valuable resources away from the effort we must undertake:  building the decentralized, public, democratically controlled networks that will provide energy for our future.

Mustering the courage and the will to build decentralized public networks will never come from news reports, cost/benefit studies or climate regulations – it can only come from the understanding that without such systems, we are sunk. As the old saying goes, if you don’t watch where you’re going, you’ll end up where you’re headed.

It’s high time we changed our course.

Comments

[Mark]

Readers: I just got an email from a subscriber asking the following questions:

How can we, aside from making donations to LEN, support your efforts? More important, how can we make a difference in our community along these lines? There must be more we can offer, outside of reading your posts, donating money and simply being aware...can you give us some hints about taking action?

Here was my response:

Thanks for writing...those are good questions! It's not easy to make changes to the power structure in energy...here's an attempt to explain why.

I'm a professional engineer, and eighteen years ago I started designing and building renewable energy systems. But I soon found out that when operated stand-alone they were too expensive, and when connected to the power grid the utilities retain the right to disconnect them at any time. Distributed generation will never proliferate if central utilities control access to the grid. So then I worked in policy research and started testifying at hearings and lobbying, but I found out utilities are incredibly influential over local, state and federal political processes. Next I raised nearly $2 million in funding and carried out a 3-year study showing the technical feasibility and economic benefits of building a large, community-based energy network to serve Santa Fe. But local officials were afraid of pissing off PNM, and they wouldn't even give me a meeting in front of the City Council to present the results. Since that time, and perhaps in response to projects like mine, utilities successfully lobbied for a law that guarantees their revenues regardless of sales, and that was the final straw. The law, called "revenue decoupling", eliminates the benefits customers would normally received from defecting from the utility or reducing their use through efficiency. Can you see how comprehensive their grip on power is, and how the walls are caving in on our options to do anything about them?

So the only remaining avenue, in my mind, is to expose electric utilities for what they really are, rally public support in opposition to what they are doing, and parlay that opposition into a movement that finally gets rid of monopoly utilities controlling a centralized power grid. Central power should have faded like eight track tapes and typewriters, but somehow it's still here.

I am ready and willing to catalyze that movement, and I need lots of help with it, but right now the roles are pretty well limited to spreading the message and raising the funds. If you can help with either of those, including by making a donation to support my work, I'd be grateful. Feel free to get in touch, and all the best, - Mark.